“False priest, false priest,” she chanted, dancing a jig in the mist, her feet throwing up water, and she was laughing.
He rubbed his eyes, her face was like liquid, changing shapes and then reforming again.
“Save her, Father, heavenly Father, she is good and innocent, save her.” It was his voice, coming from behind him, and he turned and stared at the man with the knife. It was his own face, beneath the rain cap, smiling at him. It was spattered with blood.
And then it changed into Father Soileau’s face.
Then the archbishop’s.
And Joey Moran’s.
Back to his own.
He took a few steps backward.
“False priest, false priest.”
“Save her, Father, save her, oh God, save her, protect...”
“...priest, false priest...”
“...heavenly Father, save her...”
“...false priest...”
“...Father...”
“...priest...”
He started screaming.
It stopped raining just before the sun rose, and the pumps, which had been straining for days to keep up, finally managed to drain the water from the streets. Throughout the French Quarter, people were getting up, getting ready for work. Businesses were unlocked, lights turned on, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief that the rain was finally over. The sun beat down, evaporating the water, and the air thickened.
“Have you tried to get the knife away from him?” Venus Casanova asked the beat cop as she sipped at her coffee, her eyes taking in the scene, the girl’s rain-soaked dead body, her shirt open to reveal the cross carved between her breasts, the rosary beads dangling from her left hand. Her eyes were open and staring up at the blue cloudless sky, her mouth frozen in a scream. Venus shuddered. You never get used to it, she thought as she turned her attention to the mumbling man holding the knife.
“I haven’t tried, we thought it better to wait for you,” the cop, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, replied. Two other uniformed cops stood safely out of reach on either side of the man, their guns carefully trained on him.
“What is he mumbling?” she asked.
“Prayers,” the cop replied. “Hail Marys and Our Fathers.”
Religious mania, she thought as she walked over and knelt down. “Michael?”
He stopped mumbling and slowly turned his head towards her. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and empty.
“Can you put the knife down?”
It clattered to the ground.
She breathed a sigh of relief, and nodded to the other officers, who moved in, grabbed him by the arms, and raised him to his feet. They cuffed him, moved him over to a squad car, and she could hear them reading him his rights. He was docile and didn’t say a word as they put him into the backseat. She waved the crime-lab guys over, and they started their work.
She glanced over at the body, and shook her head. It was over.
She looked up at the sky.
It was going to be a beautiful day.
Copyright © 2006 Greg Herren
Evening Gold
by William Dylan
The author of half a dozen non-fiction books, including Houston Then and Now and Austin Then and Now, William Dylan Powell works as an advertising copywriter in Houston, where more than 150,000 New Orleans evacuees were provided food, shelter, and jobs. This fiction debut was inspired by a visit to the French Quarter’s M.S. Rau Antiques one month before Katrina hit.
I once read that if you’re a shoe salesman and you don’t show up for work, people will miss you. But if you’re a writer, not a sole will care. That’s not entirely true. The original author of that maxim left out the unconditional love for writers found in all creditors and often many members of the law enforcement community — both of which were sorely disappointed to see me go the day I officially died.
The hour I remember most clearly that day was seven in the evening; I was in my brother’s bathtub, listening to the cicadas buzz through the window screen and trying to take my mind off having generated almost a million dollars’ worth of debt earlier that day. For some people, that’s not a lot of cabbage — maybe a bad hand at the MGM Grand. But for me, that’s almost a million dollars more than I had in the Des Moines Community Credit Union. And I don’t gamble.
The water scalded my skin, the air in the bathroom as wet and alive as the dank Louisiana air outside. I’d tricked my brain into temporarily forgetting the day’s events, the way we all do, if only for a split second, when something bad happens — like a torpedoed ship sealing off flooded compartments. My eyes had just closed, my hands folded across my chest. I was wondering if a man could drown in his sleep when I heard an explosion coming from the driveway that jolted a loofah brush off the towel rack above and squarely into the sweaty iced tea I’d been drinking.
Had I been in anyone else’s home, I would have been petrified. But my brother Bob — a mining-explosives specialist — ate, slept, and watched Matlock reruns amongst dozens of crates of explosives. Though he did use them for work, he didn’t really need them here; he just liked them here. They were part of the furniture — like milk crates in a college dorm. So when I heard the explosion, I assumed it was just another something of Bob’s that blew up. I was wrong.
Bob’s silky terrier, which had fallen intensely in love with my down jacket and insisted on dragging it all over the house since my arrival, had for once dropped its soggy orange sleeve and retreated into the bedroom closet. The motion-activated driveway light clicked on. From the bedroom window, I stood gaping at the unmistakable sight of money snowing from the sky, spiraling down like the helicopter seeds of a maple tree and occasionally scraping the window pane. I rubbed my eyes for a good three seconds — making sure I really hadn’t fallen asleep in the bathtub — but I was awake, all right. Money was literally falling from the sky; you’d have thought it would’ve been my best day on Earth — not my last.
But thinking back to the previous night’s conversation with my agent, when I was still in Des Moines, I should have known better.
“What does ‘shop it around’ mean, in terms of time, Phil?” I asked, flipping through a half-dozen utility and credit-card bills, most of which I planned to pay with the contract we were currently discussing.
“It just means that we need to find a house that shares our vision of another Detective Demitrez novel being successful in the marketplace. These last guys thought your latest work lacked a certain... humanity. We just need to get the formula right, that’s all — it takes time.”
“Time? Last time we talked, words like ‘series’ and ‘optioning’ and ‘obscene promotion budget’ kept coming up.”
“You’ve still got your teaching gig, right?”
“Yeah. But Des Moines Community College doesn’t pay enough for the twelve-hundred-calorie-a-day lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed.”
We talked for another ten minutes, but it boiled down to only an apology, more promises, and a one-way ticket to my brother’s house outside of New Orleans to let off some steam. While he and his wife were in Houston, I would turn his place into the Area 51 of self-pity (and his liquor cabinet into a dangerous crater).
New Orleans oozes literary inspiration, so as my plane touched down I’d had a sense that big, easy changes were afoot.
Next morning I’d breakfasted at Brennan’s, with mimosas and red wine; I’d gone to Faulkner House in Pirate’s Alley and bought a signed first edition of a Tim Gautreaux novel (all courtesy of Mastercard). Then I ducked into Pat O’Brien’s and spent the rest of the morning drinking, smoking cigarettes, and reading the Times Picayune and Le Monde. The stories all sounded the same. Kamikaze impersonators in the Middle East blowing it off the map. Police impersonators in New Orleans smuggling blow from offshore. Elvis impersonators in Vegas helping fat Americans blow their paychecks. All around me, people were pretending to be something else and, for the most part, achieving their personal goals in the process. I, on the other hand, was doing a lousy impersonation of a writer. My body of work was emaciated, and missing major organs.